It seemed at first to be a not unnatural impression, that even those who could recall the erased texts as they perused the injured books, --who could mentally full up the imperfect clauses,--were not at liberty to inscribe them; they seemed to fear that, if they did so, the characters would be as if written in invisible ink, or would surely fade away. It was with trembling that some at length made the attempt, and to their unspeakable joy found the impression durable. Day after day passed; still the characters remained; and the people length came to the conclusion, that God left them at liberty, if they could, to reconstruct the Bible for themselves out of their collective remembrances of its divine contents. This led again to some curious results, all of them singularly indicative of the good and ill that is in human nature. It was with incredible joy that men came to the conclusion that the book might be thus recovered nearly entire, and nearly in the very words of the original, by the combined effort of human memories. Some of the obscurest of the species, who had studied nothing else but the Bible, but who had well studied that, came to be objects of reverence among Christians and booksellers; and the various texts they quoted were taken down with the utmost care. He who could fill up a chasm by the restoration of words which were only partially remembered, or could contribute the least text that had been forgotten, was regarded as a sort of public benefactor. At length, a great public movement amongst the divines of all denominations was projected, to collate the results of these partial recoveries of the sacred text. It was curious, again, to see in how various ways human passions and prejudices came into play. It was found that the several parties who had furnished from memory the same portions of the sacred texts had fallen into a great variety of different readings; and though most of them were of as little importance in themselves as the bulk of those which are paraded in the critical recensions of Mill, Griesbach, or Tischendorf, they became, from the obstinacy and folly of the men who contended about them, important differences, merely because they were differences. Two reverend men of the synod, I remember, had a rather tough dispute as to whether it was twelve baskets full of fragments of the five loaves which the five thousand left, and seven baskets full of the seven loaves which the four thousand had left, or vice versa: as also whether the words in John vi. 19 were "about twenty or five and twenty," or "about thirty or five and thirty furlongs."